Most frameworks and larger PHP applications utilize a Dependency Injection Container with the goal of a more maintainable codebase. However, this can have an impact on performance. As loading times matter, keeping sites fast is important as ever. Today I’m going to benchmark several PHP Dependency Injection containers to see what their relative performance is like.

The libraries in their list of those tested include PHP-DI, Zend/Di and the Aura.Di component. They compare each libraries against the others based on execution time, memory usage and the number of files required to make things work. The results of each test are shown in the graphs on the rest of the post. It's also broken up into a few different kinds of tests:

Test 1 – Create an instance of an object

Test 2 – Ignoring autoloading

Test 3 – Deep object graph

Test 4 – Fetching a Service from the container

Test 5 – Inject a service

The results are pretty consistent across all of the tests with certain libraries always performing better than others....but you'll have to read the post to find out those request. The scripts that were used to get the various results are also shared on GitHub if you'd like to take them for a spin on your own.